Intel Raises the Stakes with Multicore Chip Strategy

Intel researchers are changing the way they look at multicore chips with an elaborate plan to boost performance.

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SAN FRANCISCOIntel is assembling the building blocks for a radically different chip architecture that could arrive by the end of the decade.

Although the chip giant officially announced its Core Microarchitecture at its spring Developer Forum, here, researchers at the company have already been working on a potential follow-on that will be capable of harboring tens of cores, far more than the Core Microarchitecture and its predecessor, which is already in development at the moment, Intel executives said.

Driving the new research is the fact that, within six to eight years, Intel will be able to produce chips that will have between 16 billion and 32 billion transistors, versus a maximum of 2 billion now, based on the Moore's Law tenent that states the number of transistors inside chips double every two years.

Given the immense increase expected, Intel's researchers are changing the way they look at chip design, introducing a program they call Tera-Scale Computing.

Tera-Scale Computing, at its heart, strives to shift from smaller numbers of complex processor cores to a battalion of simple, general-purpose processor cores and backing those cores up with more specialized cores for jobs such as encryption.

"It's a radical change across both the capabilities it could provide to userseither consumers or corporate usersbecause now you're taking about teraflop operations delivered to each person," said Jeff McVeigh, technical assistant to Intel CTO Justin Rattner, in Hillsboro, Ore. "It gets down to enabling platforms to take on more human line capabilities."

The work is a departure from the company's Core Microarchitecture, which focuses on getting as much work done as possible per clock cycle within two or four cores and uses a good deal of parallelism or breaking up jobs to process them more quickly.

But, instead of focusing on ways to wedge more powerful copies of its current style processor cores into a single chip, Intel's Tera-Scale Computing research project focuses on creating large numbers of smaller, simpler cores which it can augment, on chip, with more specialized cores capable of handling complex jobs such as cryptography.

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